#family-dynamics

#family-dynamics

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology has accelerated since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 and now many people lean on AI chatbots for advice and even companionship. The problem with this approach is that AI chatbots are, at least currently, quite sycophantic and don't, by default, challenge a user's worldview. Rather, they can reinforce one's current beliefs and biases. Furthermore, since we as humans have a tendency to anthropomorphize things, we perceive the output of AI chatbots as "human" and think we

She's in practically every frame as Linda, a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown as she juggles, with increasing desperation and resentment, her responsibilities as a parent, a spouse, and a professional therapist. Her husband is constantly travelling for work, leaving Linda to deal with their young, never-named daughter, who suffers from a mysterious eating disorder that requires her to be attached to a feeding tube.

When something becomes old and then new again during my lifetime, I might be forgiven for feeling at once quite aged and a little sentimental. But suggestions that the landline telephone may be having a cultural renaissance just make me feel old and somewhat triggered by experiences of fraught teenage social negotiations over the long obsolete rotary dial phone of my youth.

I would routinely stay up late watching TV or reading in bed and say yes to dinners that started long after nightfall. My relationship with mornings was casual-I'd occasionally enjoy a sunrise but I certainly never set an alarm to see one. Then I had children, whose needs demanded an early start, and I spent years stumbling out of bed at their first sounds, making breakfast, and building block towers before I'd fully woken up.

Kushal certainly has pretensions toward neutrality, even if he isn't strictly neutral. This makes him an effective narrator, as you point out. But it's the pride that Kushal takes in his neutrality that really interests me. I think he savors the idea that he exists at a remove from his family; it makes him feel unusual, even exceptional. The irony being, of course, that everyone around Kushal is equally convinced of his or her own exceptionalism.

That year, my mother was taking French lessons at the Alliance Française in Bangalore, and she claimed that her teacher had been impressed with her from the start. "Madame Aurélie says I have a natural ear," she announced one evening. "Wonderful," my father, an architect, said, not looking up from the plans he had spread across the dining table. Tarun, my sixteen-year-old brother, and I were at the table, too, wrapping our notebooks in brown paper. Summer was over; on Monday, we'd return to school.

Nobody warned me about the awkward phase with parents. For me, it was the period right after college that included landing my first important, non-internship job, taking control of my finances, and eventually moving out. I was a full-fledged adult - by society's standards. At work, I fit the bill. I was patient, poised, and responsible, always communicating respectfully, pulling my own weight, and holding myself accountable for mistakes.

Growing up intellectually gifted in a household in which no one shares your cognitive intensity creates a kind of loneliness that cannot easily be named. It is more than being smart. You are just being who you naturally are, but, inevitably, you are out of sync with the world around you. One of the sad realities of being neurodivergent and out of sync with others in the family is that you inevitably feel oppressed or humiliated.

Some couples bicker for the better part of their time together. Others may prefer to simmer in silence until something like a misplaced sock becomes a referendum on the relationship as a whole. Conflict, in its many shapes and sizes, is par for the course in intimacy. For this reason, psychologists rarely concern themselves with whether or not couples fight anymore; all signs point to the fact that conflict exists in some way or another in a majority of relationships.

I love my adult daughter, but I can't stand the person she has grown up to be. She is entirely self-centered, selfish, and materialistic. She is obsessed with status and fakes a wealthy lifestyle, but turns around and demands that her mother and I pay her bills. It has been a constant problem since she went to college and fell into a fast crowd.

When you married into your husband's family, they welcomed you as one of their own. If I read your letter correctly, they view you as a family member, and your family as blended into their own. Because you need more privacy and boundaries than you have been able to establish, you may need your husband to help you get the message across in a way they can accept without becoming offended.

Three episodes into Bravo's Wife Swap: The Real Housewives Edition, I'm ready to call this experiment a noble failure. The highly produced Wife Swap format clashes with the surprisingly nuanced family drama we get on Real Housewives, which means the women we know and love are flattened into two-dimensional types. There's very little commitment to the idea of actually trading lives - Angie was never going to use a composting toilet - and the show seems completely averse to conflict.

It's very hard for me to watch the Cardinals' offense,

"What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won't be the victim of needless suffering." ~Don Miguel Ruiz For most of my life, I didn't fully understand what projection was. I just knew I kept becoming the problem. I was "too much." Too intense. Too emotional. Thought too deeply. Spoke too plainly.

Dear Reader, I grew up in a household full of love and care-but also of elephants in the living room and eggshells I had to walk around so as not to ruffle a single feather. My parents are extremely sensitive and horrible listeners, so you can imagine how I coped: I lied. A lot. I lied to get away with things, but mostly I lied so that I wouldn't upset anyone or get into trouble.

The family dynamics this season were interesting in that there were very few parents or families who were totally against any of the couples actually getting married. In fact, so many seemed excited and completely invested in the idea that I was actually feeling a little punked as I watched all the parents welcome their kids' brand-new fiancés, whom they'd met through the pods, with open arms.

Wreck can stand on its own, but chances are, you'll want to read both books. Wreck's cover, like Sandwich's, features a soft-focus photograph of an alluring porch-fronted all-American house that telegraphs that this novel is not about a real estate teardown. In fact, the title refers to Rocky's state after being knocked off-kilter by a serious health scare and a local train crash that hits too close to home.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: When my mother passed away some years ago, my brother and his wife placed a stuffed black cat toy in her casket. My mother had owned several black cats. Months later, I was opening a Christmas gift from my brother. It turned out to be a stuffed black cat. He said, Do you know where that came from? Of course I knew! My mouth dropped open. Miss Manners, was this absolutely the worst Christmas gift ever, or am I missing something?

Donovan sat on the couch across from me, his head in his hands. "I can't be a victim of abuse," he said slowly. "Why not?" I asked gently, hoping to provoke thought and reflection. "Because I am a man!" he said, head popping up. "And he never put his hands on me..." he followed up, reflecting on the unhealthy relationship with his partner that had brought him into therapy.

Christine Brown Woolley grew up in Utah with a dad and two moms, in a polygamist community called the Apostolic United Brethren. When she became an adult, she joined a polygamist marriage as a third wife, helped raise more than a dozen kids, and became co-star of the TLC reality show Sister Wives. Fast forward to 2025, and she has left her marriage and her polygamist faith.

At my 26th birthday my childhood best friend Corinne apparently hit it off with my 56-year-old, widowed dad. They enjoyed one another's company, grabbed coffee a few days later, and one thing led to another. Now they've been dating for six months, and their relationship has become serious enough that they've told my brother and me about it. On the one hand, I'm very happy that my lonely father has found someone he might love.

Throughout my engagement, people joked about how I'd lucked out in the mother-in-law department because my husband's mother was extremely chill and not obsessed with the idea of grandkids. My husband and I are dedicated to being child-free (he got the snip in college), and it was a relief to us both that his mother was fine with that. I never expected that the problem would be with my (younger) sisters-in-law!

As a wealth advisor, I've noticed that my clients often have two reactions to meetings with me. They come out relieved, and even say "That felt like therapy." Or, they emerge worried that they shared too much. Money is really hard to talk about. So is death. It's no wonder that planning for inheritance is fraught for many families. That's why I decided to become a certified financial therapist in addition to a wealth advisor.